UK Skills awarded Silver Flora Medal at Chelsea
May 25, 2010
UK Skill Garfden: Growing World Class Talent
Awarded
RHS Silver Flora Medal
A team of talented young landscape gardeners that helped create a garden designed by UK
Skills to showcase ‘world class talent’ have had their achievements celebrated by the judges at the
prestigious RHS Chelsea Flower Show by winning a Silver Flora Medal.
UK Skills, the not for profit organisation that champions skills and learning for work through competitions and awards, created the garden “Growing World Class Talent: celebrating the workforce of tomorrow”, to promote excellence in vocational education and training. It also aimed to illustrate how greater investment in skills and development will help lift UK industry out of recession. The garden features a variety of edible, ornamental and native plants and showcases the wide range of skills that are required to construct an outdoor space suitable for 21st century living. The garden was judged in the Urban Garden category at the Show.
The extraordinary UK Skills garden build team, which included a team of talented young people all under the age of 25, created the garden from scratch using a wide range of expert skills which included: landscape gardening, bricklaying, electrical installation, cabinet making, plumbing, floristry and stonemasonry. All the skills represented in the UK Skills garden at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show are also present at the biennial WorldSkills Competition, the world’s largest international skills competition for young people.
The young team members who helped create the UK Skills garden comprised past UK WorldSkills competitors as well as upcoming, talented individuals who are looking to secure a place in Team UK for the next WorldSkills Competition, which comes to London from 5th – 8th October 2011.
The biennial WorldSkills competition, hosted by UK Skills, will be held at ExCeL London, from 5th-8th October, 2011. Over 1,200 competitors, from 50 countries/regions will compete in 45 skills from landscape gardening to hairdressing and robotics and from bricklaying to cooking and aircraft maintenance.
The UK Skills team was lead by Harry Turner, Horticultural Lecturer and WorldSkills, Team UK training manager in Landscape Gardening. The young team members included:
- Keith Chapman, 24, from Richmond, North Yorkshire: WorldSkills Shizuoka (Japan) 2007 competitor in Landscape Gardening. Awarded with a Medallion For Excellence.
- William Gadd, 22, from Bury St Edmunds: WorldSkills Calgary 2009 competitor in Landscape Gardening. Awarded with a Medallion For Excellence.
- Simon Ginger, 22, from Theberton, near Leiston, Suffolk: Former WorldSkills UK Gold Winner in Landscape Gardening, hoping to secure a place on the UK Team at EuroSkills in December 2010.
- Sam Fairgrieve, 21, from Leicester: WorldSkills Calgary 2009 competitor in Bricklaying. Awarded with a Medallion For Excellence.
- Grant Finch, 19, from Scarborough: WorldSkills Calgary 2009 Squad UK member in Landscape Gardening, hoping to secure a place in Squad UK for WorldSkills London 2011.
The UK Skills garden was designed by Paul Green, a chartered Landscape Architect and garden
designer, with more than 35 years of experience in public, private and charity sector works. Paul
already had several accolades to his name including a Silver Gilt which he was awarded by the RHS
Chelsea Flower Show in 1997 for a large garden he designed called, “Garden of Hope”. Paul also
helps UK Skills with the training and assessment of the Landscape Gardening competitors for Team
UK.
Keith Chapman, 24, a key member of the UK Skills build team and a past WorldSkills competitor, said: “To have been honoured with this award is truly amazing. We all worked really hard to create the garden and are all really proud of what we have managed to achieve. We hope that visitors will take the time to really look around the garden and start to learn just how much hard work actually goes into landscape gardening. There are lots of different skills involved and our garden shows off the best in bricklaying and stonemasonry as well as plumbing, cabinet making and electrical installation.
“People often tell me that it is a rare thing to be able to say that you love your job, but I really do. Winning the silver medal award at the RHS Chelsea Flower Show is right up there with my experience at the WorldSkills competition in Japan in 2007, as an achievement that I will always remember.”
Simon Bartley, CEO, UK Skills, added: “We are truly delighted to have won this award. What the team has achieved is outstanding. It really does make us proud to be able to fly the flag and celebrate the breadth of young talent that the UK’s most skilled and dedicated vocational trainees have to offer.
“We hope that the garden will inspire visitors attending the Show to think about how landscape gardening and other skilled vocations can be extremely rewarding careers which we would love to see many more young people get involved in.”
Please see further details at the link below on the RHS website about our garden and all the other medal winners at this years’ Show.
http://www.rhs.org.uk/Shows-Events/RHS-Chelsea-Flower-Show/2010/Gardens/Awards/Silver
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For more information, please contact Tom York at UK Skills:
Email: tom.york@ukskills.org.uk
Tel: 020 7429 2828
